One of the main pillars of Barack Obama's reputation -- his gift for healing words would combine with the power of his biography to transcend the rancor of modern politics -- has never looked more wobbly. | REUTERS

Obama's media skills face pivotal test

This summer marked the fifth anniversary of the Democratic Party’s swoon for Barack Obama, who thrilled millions of people hearing the young state senator for the first time with words that set his image as a dazzling unifier in an age of mean and divisive politics:

“Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes,” Obama told the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston. “Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America — there’s the United States of America.”

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Five years later — amid declining approval ratings and an increasingly polarized debate over health care — President Obama is losing his argument. Far from taming the forces of accusation, personal malice and ideological fervor, Obama and his signature health care agenda this summer became their target — and at least partly their victim.

What’s more, as he prepares to address Congress in a nationally televised speech Wednesday, one of the main pillars of Obama’s reputation — that his gift for healing words would combine with the power of his biography to transcend the rancor of modern politics — has never looked more wobbly.

Even some Democratic strategists say Obama and his vaunted political and communications teams should have seen it coming.

“The true impact of congressional or party leadership is declining every day compared to the power of blogs and talk radio,” said longtime Democratic pollster Paul Maslin. “It was surprising to me that Obama and company were caught unaware by this. They should have been first to realize you can mobilize people and use forms of communication to get people riled up.”

Maslin, who resides in Madison, Wis., said he’s seen the power of the right wing even in his liberal college town, where there have been conservative tea parties to rail against Obama’s plans to increase taxes on the wealthy to pay for his expansive agenda.

“They’re not the majority, but they’re vocal,” Maslin said. “And they’ve used guerrilla tactics to dominate the debate.”

One of the summer’s surprises has been the degree to which angry “town halls” filled with opponents of health care reform has driven the political narrative — no matter that Democrats own both the White House and Congress, no matter that many news organizations were slow to reckon with the consequences of a movement gathering power far from the traditional corridors of power.

Similarly, it was former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, out of office and using her Facebook page, who pushed into broad circulation the discredited notion that health care reform would include “death panels”. More recently, it was Palin’s right-wing media allies who drove White House environmental adviser Van Jones out of office and created fear about Obama’s ultimately innocuous back-to-school speech.

Most Washington oddsmakers consider it more likely than not that some compromise on health care will reach Obama’s desk this fall — a big victory, if it comes, and one that would easily chase away this summer’s headlines.

But what’s been lost in the furor — perhaps irretrievably — is the idea that Obama might represent a transformational brand of politics of the sort he envisioned five years ago in Boston.

White House aides counsel patience.

“Obama is the only modern Democrat to take on the right-wing noise machine and win — and he has done so repeatedly,” said a senior White House official. “And we always take the long view: Win the war, not the battle. It’s how we won the campaign, it’s how we will pass health reform.”

The summer storms, however, highlighted two realities. One is that — for all Obama’s campaign team was celebrated for its use of “new media” and “social networking”— his White House is split along generational lines that may limit its dexterity.

While some aides heavily promote the use of new media technology to combat viral political assaults, other top aides like White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel devote their most concerted messaging efforts to established news outlets like the major broadcast networks and, most of all, The New York Times.